The School of Cities’ Graduate Fellows program supports graduate students from across the University of Toronto who are working on urban-focused research projects in any department or discipline. This year, we announced the Jonathan and Erin Gouveia Fellowship, which will be granted to one applicant each year, who will receive approximately $4,000 on the basis of academic merit; research that is actionable and addresses an urban challenge; and demonstrated leadership in extracurricular activities. The recipient of the Jonathan and Erin Gouveia Fellowship will present their research at a seminar convened by the School of Cities at the end of the grant period.
We are excited to announce Benjamin Owens as the inaugural Jonathan and Erin Gouveia Fellow. Benjamin is a PhD student in the Department of Geography & Planning at the University of Toronto. As an urban and economic geographer, his doctoral research examines the intersections of housing and work in the context of urban youth homelessness, with a focus on how these dimensions of life interface and co-produce in broader precarious life arrangements. Before starting his PhD, Benjamin worked as a researcher in the youth homelessness sector, including as Supervisor of Research at Covenant House Toronto, where he played a leadership role in participatory and community-engaged projects on housing, harm reduction, and homelessness prevention. Learn more about Benjamin’s research and publications on the website of the Department of Geography & Planning.
How did you hear about the School of Cities graduate fellowships, and why did you apply for the Jonathan and Erin Gouveia Fellowship in particular?
I first learned about the School of Cities graduate fellowships through departmental communications, and I was excited by the opportunity to work in an interdisciplinary setting with faculty mentors and fellow graduate students passionate about urban research and creative knowledge mobilization. I applied to the Jonathan and Erin Gouveia Fellowship with the goal of translating my research into practical, actionable interventions that centre the young people I work with and amplify their visions for a more just housing and homelessness services landscape.
What is your discipline, and what are the urban-related areas of research within it that interest you?
I’m a human geographer in the Department of Geography & Planning. My work is animated by literature on the spaces and places associated with urban homelessness, particularly research that reveals the structural forces shaping (in)access to public space and housing, and decolonial research on the ways unhoused people persist, create community, and make life amid these conditions of structural violence. I also draw extensively from the subfield of labour geographies, particularly scholarship that troubles narrow conceptions of labour as formal and waged to consider the array of precarious, informal, and socially reproductive work that people engage in to both generate income and reproduce life.
Can you summarize the research that this grant will be supporting? What is actionable about it?
As a subset of my broader dissertation project, this research aims to interrogate the shelter as a space co-constituted by layered work and living relations. I seek to explore how the shelter, as a site of precarious residence, mediates unhoused young people’s experiences of formal and informal work. Inversely, I am also curious how the work that unhoused young people perform – including work that is criminalized, socially reproductive, and unwaged – reconfigures shelter geographies, or the ways shelter spaces are used and made meaningful. I will approach these interrelated phenomena through interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and creative ‘counter-mapping’ with participants, co-creating knowledge to inform developments in employment and housing services as well as empower young people to communicate and (re)value their labour and agentic roles in shaping institutional spaces and life.
Why is this research important to you? In what ways do you hope it might contribute to positive change within the urban environments it addresses?
Research on the relationship between housing and work is critical not only for understanding experiences of precarity but for changing them. At shelters, employment services are frequently separate, physically and/or administratively, from those addressing housing. Thinking about precarity at these interfaces is, I believe, necessary to treat a multidimensional condition as such in the pursuit of social transformation. There also remains a popular and academic imaginary of unhoused people as recipients of top-down institutional supports, obscuring the ways they shape these spaces and services through their own labour, and I hope to address this misconception with my work as well.
What extracurricular activities are you involved in that supported your application for the Jonathan and Erin Gouveia Fellowship?
Prior to starting my PhD, I worked in the youth homelessness sector for several years, coordinating and supervising a range of community-engaged research projects on housing and homelessness. My ongoing involvement with these projects has deepened my commitment to collaborative and participatory research, with the aim of amplifying the voices of unhoused people in conversations about homelessness and housing.
Once this research and your studies are complete, where do you see yourself going next?
After completing my PhD, I hope to continue this research, ideally in a university or non-profit setting. Continuing this emphasis on the relationship between housing and work, I would be interested in expanding my analysis beyond the shelter to consider the experiences of young people in other institutional housing spaces (e.g., transitional and supportive housing), independent housing, and informal living arrangements. I also hope to translate the dissertation into a book project!
What do you think is a main challenge faced by cities today? What is an exciting opportunity?
I think the twinned crises of housing affordability and the rise of precarious and insecure work are significant challenges for major cities, including Toronto. For folks living in youth shelters, the inaccessibility of housing is compounded and prolonged by barriers to stable jobs and by the scarcity of employment that can sustain life in a high-cost-of-living city. I’m heartened by recent shifts to move beyond the ‘continuum of care’ model – which positions employment as a precondition for receiving housing supports – as one potential step towards the decoupling of labour market participation from the right to housing.
Project description
Shelter Geographies at Work: Unbounding and emplacing the work experiences of unhoused youth in Toronto, Ontario
In the city of Toronto, youth shelters represent critical – if underfunded, precarious, and institutional – social infrastructure targeting the 800-1000 young people who experience homelessness on any given night (City of Toronto, 2021). Given the predominant ‘staircase’ model for social supports, which disciplines labour market participation as a precursor to transitioning to independent housing, many unhoused youth in Toronto participate in the formal labour market, often in precarious and temporary work arrangements (Gaetz et al., 2016; Thulien et al., 2018). For others, informal economic activity provides an additional or alternative source of income, including work that is criminalized (McDowell & Bonner-Thompson, 2019; Plaster, 2024). Recent research has also highlighted the centrality of kinship networks and non-market economies of care that exist between unhoused youth, supplementing and, potentially, supplanting professionalized homelessness services, which are often based in the shelter (Plaster, 2024).
Despite the centrality of work – broadly construed – to the lives of unhoused youth, there is a dearth of literature on their experiences of such. Indeed, with a disproportionate focus on services and outcomes, much scholarship reproduces the notion that young people are recipients of top-down institutional homelessness supports (or the work of shelters and shelter workers) as opposed to agential participants actively shaping these spaces and services through their own labour. As a subset of my broader dissertation research, this project aims to interrogate the shelter as a space co-constituted by these layered urban work relations. It asks, specifically: how does the shelter, as a site of both living and work, produce unhoused youth’s experiences of formal and informal work? Contrariwise, how does the work of unhoused youth (re)configure shelter geographies? The project will take an exploratory, qualitative methodological approach, drawing on interviews and focus groups with unhoused youth (ages 16-24) and staff at a single site – Covenant House Toronto, the city’s largest youth shelter—to consider this co-productive relationship.
While the project is in many ways theoretical, contributing to geographic and interdisciplinary literature on urban homelessness and expanding labour geographies scholarship to consider a more capacious understanding of ‘labour’ in shaping spaces of work, it also has applied and policy-relevant implications. Through my work with unhoused youth and shelter workers, I aim to address policy concerns associated with homelessness employment services – which are frequently ‘siloed’ physically and/or administratively from those addressing housing and other dimensions of life (Diamond, 2020) – by highlighting a holistic and capacious approach to understanding work vis-à-vis unhoused youth’s lives. The second objective is to generate knowledge – and disseminate it through creative knowledge mobilization strategies, including participant-created counter-maps – that potentially offers opportunities for unhoused youth to communicate and (re)value their myriad labours and agentic role in shelter geographies.
References
City of Toronto. (2021). Street needs assessment 2021. Shelter, Support, and Housing Administration.
Diamond, M. (2020). Pathway to opportunity: Apprenticeships and breaking the cycles of poverty for young people experiencing homelessness.
Young Invincibles. Gaetz, S., O’Grady, B., Kidd, S., & Schwan, K. (2016).
Without a home: The national youth homelessness survey. The Canadian Observatory on Homelessness. https://www.homelesshub.ca/YouthWithoutHome
